


Next Of Kin (November 3 1986 - October 5 2014)

by FeathersMcStrange



Category: The November Man (2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 17:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2278929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can be a human, or a killer of humans.</p>
<p>David Mason makes the right choice and it isn't enough.</p>
<p>Happy endings are for fairytales, not twenty seven year old blond assassins who were never quite good enough at their job to make it to their twenty eighth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Next Of Kin (November 3 1986 - October 5 2014)

**Author's Note:**

> Don't even ask where this came from. I just came home and bashed it out, because I was upset about this character.
> 
> It was a grimdark gritty action flick, I wasn't supposed to have FEELINGS.

There is no next of kin on file. There are costs to living lives of lies, and one of those is kith and kin. Somebody to answer the call about your death. Not that he is around to worry about how Celia’s thumb hovers uncertainly over the phone keypad, staring at the blank ‘next of kin’ box taunting her from the computer monitor.

She read the report on his death and stared at the screen for a good ten minutes, mind a blank. It is clinical and efficient and emotionless. Just like he was. Just like he had been. It had taken six shots to take him down.

One, left shoulder. One, left thigh. One, stomach. One, right lung.

Double tap. Back of the head.

You do not defy as many dangerous people as he has and live to tell the tale. He has never been as good as the man who trained him, maybe he’s never really had the heart for it. (Exactly the opposite most likely. Too much heart when the only thing that would have saved him is none at all.) He isn’t- wasn’t the man he was trained to be, never truly was, and one day he made a mistake, and now Celia sits at her desk with her phone in her hand, and nobody to call.

It isn’t right, she thinks. A man is dead, and somebody should mourn for him.

She calls Peter Devereaux.

“David is dead,” Celia says in a rush, as soon as the line clicks on. There is silence from the other end of the phone until a shocked twelve year old voice says ‘I’ll get dad’, and a few moments later Devereaux speaks.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Agen-” She stops. “Celia. I’m Celia and I’m-” She stops again. The tenses of that sentence are wrong and she doesn’t know how it is supposed to end. After a moment she licks her lips, shifts in her seat, and continues. “I was a friend of David Mason.” It’s not as much of an exaggeration as it was supposed to be. She’d liked David.

He’d had a nice laugh.

On the other end she can hear him breathing. It seems even. Too even. Carefully controlled. He knows what has happened, but she tells him anyway. Maybe she needs to hear herself say it out loud to believe it.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but he’s been killed.”

“I see.”

The line clicks dead.

“There was nobody else to call,” she tells the empty air.

A few minutes later, the others arrive and the room comes alive with lights and noise. Celia sits up straight, takes a deep breath, and clicks on her headset.

“Where are we with Operation Blackbird?”

Life goes on.

Somewhere across the world, Lucy Devereaux asks her father who David is. Peter looks at her with an expression that is thought tinged with regret.

“Just somebody I knew a long time ago.” He kisses her head and tells her not to worry about it. That evening he is quiet, and he makes dinner lost in thought. He thinks about a blond boy who he had always known was too fucking soft for this game. He thinks about David.

Peter thinks about calling the estranged sister he knows David had in New York City, the one he’d spoken to last when he was maybe fifteen years old. Foster kids lose touch too easy. He doesn’t call her.

There are only two people at the funeral. He looks at Celia and smiles tightly. She smiles back. It is over hardly after it starts, and the casket is buried deep into the ground, and Peter knows with lead in his chest that nobody will remember David in a month, in a year, just a new name on a wall of forgotten names, a new headstone in a graveyard of forgotten lives.

That isn’t entirely true, Peter thinks, hearing Celia take in a deep breath beside him, letting it out slowly, both of them reading the carved words on the nondescript grey marble headstone.

_David Isaac Mason_

_November 3 1986 – October 5 2014_

_Age 27_

_Beloved son, brother, and friend._

Every word of it is a lie.

(For the most part.)

Peter Devereaux retires quietly to the countryside with his daughter.

David Mason dies violent and messy in an alley alone.

So the story goes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Next Of Kin (November 3 1986 - October 5 2014)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2292728) by [librariandragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librariandragon/pseuds/librariandragon)




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